As promised: The state of my “2009 awesomeness” playlist, in which I collect the songs that catch my ear as the year progresses in order to not make my best-of list a last-minute-of-December clusterfuck sort of thing. (It inevitably winds up being like that, but you know, I have noble intentions.) It’s after the jump, and has some contextual links added in. Feel free to make your own and share it here! More »
Tinted Windows, the generation-spanning act that brought together members of Hanson, Fountains of Wayne, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Cheap Trick for cheery tunes and maximum bloggability, had their debut album come out yesterday. Eric “Professor” Harvey came up with a fun parlor game in honor of what he’s calling the self-titled record’s “astonishing competence”–namely, what would your dream version of such a powerpop Voltron look like? The formula, and my attempt to solve for “x,” after the jump. More »
In today’s noontime headline roundup: A Pixies box set with no new material, a Breeders EP with a few new songs, a possible Oasis hiatus, and Lauryn Hill returns to the stage! More »
Kim and Kelley Deal’s sister act The Breeders have a new EP Fate To Fatal coming out on Tuesday, and the title track is catchy yet off-kilter, giving off a vibe that’s well-matched to the slow-motion destruction wrought by the members of the St. Louis derby rollerleague the Arch Rivals in the attendant video. Rolling Stone has the clip and an MP3 online, and those of you with a better eye than me should see if I’m right about there being a cameo by former bassist Josephine Wiggs within. (The woman crying blood at about the :30 mark—I may be thrown off by the eye makeup, though.) Anyway, RS hasn’t made the video embeddable on other sites, so before you go over there to watch it, why not enjoy a few other Breeders gems here?
One thing that’s been nice about Coachella: Most of the outstanding performances so far have served as a nice corrective to my complaints about the male-white-semi-corporate-oppressive nature of current alt-rock. I saw four terrific performances from lady-powered bands that almost made me feel a tiny bit less despondent about the gender balance of rock right now: Portishead (who I saw Thursday night), the Breeders, Tegan & Sara, and Santogold all made me happy to be there, to the point where I didn’t even worry about when my last sunscreen application was until after each of their sets. (And yeah, it’s probably not much of a surprise that 50% of them first appeared on my personal radar back in the ’90s.) Video and brief writeups after the jump.
So yesterday’s announcement that a Steve Albini-produced Breeders record was in the offing was followed up by the band debuting a track from said album on its MySpace page. It’s called “We’re Gonna Rise,” and it’s… More »
So yesterday’s announcement that a Steve Albini-produced Breeders record was in the offing was followed up by the band debuting a track from said album on its MySpace page. It’s called “We’re Gonna Rise,” and it’s… More »
So yesterday’s announcement that a Steve Albini-produced Breeders record was in the offing was followed up by the band debuting a track from said album on its MySpace page. It’s called “We’re Gonna Rise,” and it’s… More »
